8 February 2026

Gettin’ Saved: Beautiful on the Mountain

Romans 10:14-17

We read from Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 10, verses 14-17. 

14But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? 15And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’ 16But not all have obeyed the good news; for Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed our message?’ 17So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ. 

In 1980, when I was sixteen, I made my public commitment to ministry. At the time, that commitment was to be a missionary with the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. That didn’t happen, exactly, but you can’t blame me for settling on that calling. Not only were my parents Southern Baptist missionaries, but that was the year that Southern Baptists rolled out a grand new mission campaign. They were going to reach everyone in the world with the gospel by the year 2000. The campaign was called “Bold Mission Thrust.” An unfortunate name. I think the metaphor they were striving for was military – a plan of attack, or something – but whatever they were thinking, I’m pretty sure that there was no woman in the room at that particular strategy meeting. Anyway, I was at Foreign Mission Week at a Baptist conference center, and in his keynote message the President of the Foreign Mission Board noted how many Southern Baptist men were serving in ministry, then noted how few of them were missionaries overseas. Most Baptist ministers stayed where there were the most Christians, and only a few went to where there were the fewest. The speaker roared: “God’s not that stupid a general!” The implication, of course, was that if we were going to reach everyone in the world with the gospel in twenty years, more Southern Baptist ministers were going to have to go into overseas mission work. Now given that the world’s population in 1980 was about four and half billion, one might have thought that it would take a bit more than that, but that didn’t matter to me. I did my part: I walked the aisle and volunteered for missions.

As we conclude our series on salvation this week, I want to talk about a related issue, evangelism. Sharing our salvation with others. I talked last week about how the revivalist understanding of salvation as an irrevocable event that happens to a person at a point in time leads to an emphasis in many churches on doing anything to get people through that event. In “Bold Mission Thrust” we see that emphasis and that urgency projected on a global scale, but for most of my life evangelism was small scale and very personal. I don’t remember how young I was when I began hearing that I was responsible for “witnessing” to my friends, but it was early. By the time I walked that aisle at Foreign Mission Week, I had already been through at least three different witness training seminars, including an extensive series of evangelism classes to prepare me to be a counselor at the Singapore Billy Graham Crusade in 1978. I knew the Roman Road to Salvation by heart. I had memorized the Bridge Illustration. I had been taught how to pretend to be a person’s friend until I could get them to come to church. I mean, they didn’t actually say it that way, but that’s what it was. Market research had shown that it required a minimum of seven contacts with a prospect – That’s what we called people: “prospects” – as I say, a minimum of seven contact before they will listen to you witness to them. So you have to cozy up to them. A quick example: when new neighbors moved into your neighborhood, you were supposed to immediately take cookies. But don’t take them in a disposable dish; use a good dish that they’ll have to return, which will give you a second contact.  Of course, the best way to get around all those preliminaries is to witness to someone you already have a lot of contact with – a co-worker or classmate – so we were forever being told to do just that. This was deadly serious, too. I was told several times by youth leaders to imagine myself at judgment day, ready to go into heaven, when suddenly one of my friends from school appears, but he’s in the line going to hell. That friend looks right at me, points, and says, “It’s not fair! He never told me!” So if I didn’t witness to a friend and he went to hell, it’d be my fault. That might have been a tad heavy to lay on a fifteen-year-old.

Well, most of my friends were Christians who went to the same Friday night Bible study that I did. But I had one good friend who didn’t. My chemistry lab partner David. I knew I was supposed to witness to him, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. What was wrong with me? Did I not love Jesus? It just felt wrong. Finally, I screwed my courage to the sticking place one day, took a deep breath, and said, “David? Are you a Christian?” He replied, “Yes. Why? Did I do something that you thought …?” “No! No! No! I was just wondering.” Whew! It turns out that David was Catholic. Now, to be sure, in the world I lived in, Catholic was still sub-optimal, but I didn’t care. It was close enough. I didn’t have to witness to David.

I think by this point in my reminiscences I have covered most of the reasons that “evangelism” has become a hated word. To us, it smells of arrogance and self-righteousness. It evokes images of people being treated as objects, as “prospects” for conversion, instead of as actual human beings. It feels like shyster marketing. It resonates of awkward, artificial conversations and manipulation. And the thing is, even those of us who breathed in that notion of evangelism like particulate matter in our atmosphere knew that it felt wrong! There was a reason that I didn’t want to witness to David. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Jesus. It was that I did love David, and I instinctively knew that starting a canned conversation to maneuver him into doing something that I wanted him to do was manipulation, and was not treating him like a friend. In that scenario, he was just a thing I was supposed to accomplish, a goal I was to achieve for the sake of Jesus. This picture of evangelism – which is the only picture that most people have – calls for us to go to people in the name of Christ and treat them exactly as Christ did not treat people. 

But what else can we do? Christ told us in the Great Commission to go to all the world and make disciples. And in our scripture today, Paul spells it out clearly. “How are people to trust in Christ if no one tells them about him? And who’s going to tell them if nobody sends them out? So send! And tell!” Then he quotes that fascinating image from Isaiah 52, “How beautiful are the feet of those who tell good news.” So we still have this task, to bring good news to the world, but the only way most of us can picture doing it is repugnant. What are we to do?

Let me make a couple of suggestions. First of all, notice that phrase “good news.” “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.” As you probably already know, the word evangelism comes from the Greek word evangelion which simply means good news. Evangelism is to tell good news. But is our message good news? To tell people that they have to say these words and pray this prayer and join this church or God will punish them for eternity is not good news. If that’s what God is like – handing out favors to members of his party and retribution to everyone else – then we’re not describing a god of love but a cosmic tinpot dictator, and as we’ve all seen from history and contemporary politics, the favors of a dictator are random and unstable and can be snatched away in a second. If that’s what God is like, that’s not good news for anybody. No wonder I couldn’t bring myself to witness to David; I had been trained in an evangelism of threat. So if the story of Jesus is actually good news and not just a pass handed to favorites, what is that good news? It is that God is not a tinpot dictator but actually is love, could no more stop loving you than he could stop being God, because love is who he is. But love is a peculiar thing: it can only fully blossom when it is returned. God loves you, and longs for you to love God back.

Which takes us one more time to the theme of every sermon in this series on salvation: what if we thought of salvation not as a thing that we acquire but as a relationship that we begin. “Salvation” is a friendship that we have with our creator, a friendship that might have begun in a moment or developed gradually over years, but either way is vital and growing each day. Now, how do you share a valued friendship with someone else? I’ll tell you what you don’t do. You don’t memorize a sales pitch. You don’t learn a bunch of quotations by heart that will demonstrate why someone needs to meet your friend and what will happen to them if they don’t. You don’t force one friend on another friend. And you certainly don’t do it to strangers in the street. No, sharing friendships happens organically. It’s not “You need to do this thing”; it’s “You know, I have a friend that I think you’d like. We should get together sometime.”

How does that translate to talking about God? First, recognize what is our good news. We’re not selling memberships to our club on commission, we’re telling lonely, wounded people that they are loved. And how do we communicate that? Well, words aren’t sufficient to communicate love. The only way to communicate love is by loving. So our first good news is not “God loves you.” Our first good news is, “I love you.” When that sinks in, when your friend knows that you love them in spite of everything and wonders why, then you can say, “I love you, because I was loved first. Would you like to hear about it?”

Hmm. But, as you may have noticed, that might take a long time. It can take years to develop trusting friendships. That’s not Bold Mission Thrust. We’re never going to share the gospel with the now nine billion people on planet earth in the next twenty years that way! Yes, that’s right. I think we’re going to have to put aside our egos and accept that our missionary and evangelistic efforts are not God’s only plan for redeeming the children of Adam and Eve. As I heard someone say one time, God’s not that stupid a general. I don’t know everything that God is doing around the world to restore relationship with his erring children, but I do know this: Having known God’s love myself, my task is to extend that same love to others, and when it comes up make sure people know where that love comes from. That would be good news.